MAISAN15, Dubai
Rami Farook: item discontinued, curated by Ruba Al-Sweel
Rami Farook, installation view of Doha 2014, from the series item discontinued (2020) photo prints in artist frame, 107 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Maisan15.
In Trains, Planes and Automobiles: The End of the Postmodern Moment, American academic Walter Russell Mead wrote, “Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different—that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another.”
Borrowing from French social theorist Michel Foucault’s notions of space, item discontinued approaches Maisan15, an F&B dispenser-turned- exhibition space as a heterotopia: a world within worlds—mirroring the outside yet disrupting it. Off-center and deep into Al Barsha South, Maisan15 was once a terrain vague, clawed out of the oblivion and situated on the ground floor of an Emirates airline accommodation. A deserted cavity in the landscape, it bore no unit number, electrical circuits, or a designated function. By aesthetic observation only, one could suss out that it was intended for parking vehicles. Today, it is a site of relaxation and consumption and serves a third purpose: an extension of the otherwise siloed world of exhibition-making.
item discontinued brings together works by multidisciplinary artist and producer Rami Farook that echo Facault’s principle of a heterotopia, departing from his diaristic practice. A cursory glance at Farook’s work activates a sense of incongruity, the kind experienced in the first seconds of consciousness sweeping into the body after blissful slumber or the disorientation in the refracted views of fun house mirrors. In his mixed media on paper, Farook uses the space as confessionals where normative behavior is temporarily discontinued. He makes grand declarations of clashing visual and textual elements into a complex web, generating some feeling of disturbance and cognitive dissonance.
In Doha 2014 (2020) he documents a formative, self-imposed artist residency in the city, creating with each image a window into dizzying worlds.
A portrait of American popstress Lana del Rey paired with nondescript scenes of a GCC landscape; screen grabs from an old phone sit next to candids of unidentified individuals; calligraphy and kitschy studio photos abound. In art & life (2015), Farook collects reclaimed wood from around Dubai, framing fragments of imagery found in magazine ads that freeze-frame the empty haute couture gaze of a model as well as images from his own Instagram feed, including Ibrahim Abu Mismar’s intervention in the streets of Paris. His canvas works such as a void in the gallery (2014), a blank projection (2020), and a hole in the gallery (2020) attempt to create a rupture in the white cube from which art can leak out into the world. Monochromatic and clean-cut, he makes out of the canvas an escape room, involving the viewer in finding the way out, often created by blotches of black paint. In a spotlight in the gallery (2020), light enters the space, creating a beam focused on the inherent emptiness of that which it seeks to highlight. item discontinued is set up in a way to create a cross-pollination between two worlds, reveling in the experiences and narratives that spring out of this collision.
“The present epoch will perhaps be, above all, the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed,” Michel Foucault in Des Espace Autres, an essay published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, in 1984.